Hobby Operating Systems

This OS news poll only lists a handful, and doesn't bother to
provide any helpful links, so I have done that below.

With the possible exception of OpenBeOS and Syllable/Atheos,
there's nothing there that is particularly "different". Where are
the real radical ideas, like a pure virtual memory OS that only
uses disks as backing store or perhaps a "network os" where
everything is packet based? Oh, well: maybe one of these will ring
your chimes:

Plan 9

Minix

This is the famous OS that wasn't what Linux Torvalds wanted. It's author
is the guy who carped about Linux and wrote the famous Operating Systems Design and Implementation books (I have an early copy around here somewhere).

OpenBeOS

This is an attempt to keep the BeOS alive as a desktop OS . BeOS
once was desktop oriented, but closed down and sold everything to
Palm. The distinguishing aspect of Be and OpenBeOS is their object
focus. The whole OS interface is object based, which means you
would program for it in C++ or some other object oriented language.

KolibriOS

Syllable

Syllable is a fork of Atheos. Both are "semi POSIX"; that is,
they don't intend POSIX compliance but do borrow strongly. The
distinguishing feature here seems to be the non-X GUI and a file
system that is reminiscent of Mac resource forks, but extended to
multiple forks.

TriangleOS

This is one-man effort, and the source code is not available. It
is surprisingly complete considering that, though there are of
course major omissions still. I can't find anything you'd call
unusual here: it's another OS.

FreeDOS

The goal here is a free, 100% MSDOS compatible OS. Some people
may wonder why, but in fact there is still a large amount of MSDOS
code kicking about, some of it doing fairly important tasks, and
porting it to other systems can be hard. As the day is fast
approaching where you won't be able to buy real MSDOS at all, this
could become very necessary.

AROS

This is for the Amiga lovers. For those who have never
experienced the fervor of a true Amigo explaining why nothing since
has even come close to what Amiga was, well, it's something
everyone should experience at least once. Some of their rantings
actually have a base in reality, so don't discount this out of
hand.